Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) has been conducting the design study of an original design concept of gas turbine high temperature reactor, the GTHTR300 (Gas Turbine High Temperature Reactor 300). The GTHTR300 is a greatly simplified HTGR-GT plant that leads to substantially reduced technical and cost requirements for earlier technology deployment. Also, it is expected to be an efficient and economically competitive reactor in 2010s due to newly proposed design features such as core design with two-year refueling interval, conventional steel material usage for a reactor pressure vessel, innovative plant flow scheme and horizontally installed gas turbine unit.
This paper describes the original design features focusing on reactor core design, fuel design, in-core structure design and reactor pressure vessel design. In addition, a preliminary cost evaluation proved that the capital cost of the GTHTR300 is less than a target cost of 200 thousands Yen/kWe. The present study is entrusted from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.
